Ukraine sees increase in use of payment cards

The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) says the number of transactions with payment cards issued by Ukrainian banks increased by 24.5% in January-March 2020 year-over-year (y-o-y), to 1.385 billion, while the volume of these transactions grew by 15.6%, to UAH 920.5 billion (US$34.3 billion).

The share of cashless transactions with the use of payment cards was 85.4%, or UAH 1.18 billion (US$44 million), the regulator said on its website on May 21.

Cashless transactions amounted to UAH 503 billion (US$18.8 billion), or 54.6% of card transactions, while this figure was 49.7% y-o-y.

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Cashless payments conducted via retail outlets account for 50.3%, the largest share in terms of the number of transactions. Card-to-card transfers dominate in terms of volume of transactions with a 41.3% share. The average check of one transaction amounted to UAH 1,505 (US$56.22).

The number of payment cards in Ukraine was 68.6 million as of April 1.

Moreover, cashless transactions using contactless and tokenized cards account for more than a third of the total number and volume of cashless transactions via POS terminals.

The dynamics of the expansion of cashless payment infrastructure remain stable. Currently, nine POS terminals out of 10 provide cashless payments (90.2% of all POS terminals), while as of April 1, 2019, only eight POS terminals out of 10 handled cashless payments.

The number of POS terminals grew by 14.5% in January-March 2020, to 331,400, the NBU said.

As UNIAN reported earlier, the number of transactions with payment cards grew by 29% in 2019 y-o-y, to 5 billion, while the volume of these transactions grew by 24%, to UAH 3.6 trillion (US$134.4 billion).